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Not only did Ma land an official partnership with Beijing’s CDC, the agency later invited him to the 2012 conference where he unexpectedly connected with Li and told the political leader to his face that he ran a website for gay people. Li, widely seen as one of the more liberal members of China’s ruling elite, reacted positively. That single political endorsement helped Blued convince investors that the app wasn’t at risk of being shut down, Liu said.The Empire Strikes BackWhat makes dancing on China’s Great Firewall so difficult is that the ground below is inherently unstable: Content permitted today…
Google is kicking off its biggest marketing push for Gemini, its generative AI assistant, in a feel-good Super Bowl ad meant to humanize the tech. In the 60-second spot, set to air during the third quarter of the Feb. 8 game, a mother helps prepare her young son, Ben, for a big move to a new home with help from Gemini. She asks Gemini to pull up photos of the new house, then drops in a picture of Ben’s current room to show him how his bed, his toys, and even the dog’s bed can fit into his new room. Then,…
People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code. While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments. Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure…
A team of geologists has found for the first time evidence that two ancient, continent-sized, ultrahot structures hidden beneath the Earth have shaped the planet’s magnetic field for the past 265 million years.These two masses, known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs), are part of the catalog of the planet’s most enormous and enigmatic objects. Current estimates calculate that each one is comparable in size to the African continent, although they remain buried at a depth of 2,900 kilometers.Low-lying surface vertical velocity (LLVV) regions form irregular areas of the Earth’s mantle, not defined blocks of rock or metal as one might…
The numbers$213.4 billion: Net sales in the fourth quarter, increasing 12% year-over-year excluding changes in foreign exchange rates.$21.3 billion: How much Amazon made from advertising in the fourth quarter, representing 22% year-over-year growth. Amazon made $68 billion from advertising in 2025.$35.5 billion: How much Amazon made in the third quarter from its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, up 24% year-over-year. AWS has a $142 billion annual run rate, up from $132 billion in the third quarter.$200 billion: Capital expenditure spending in 2026, up from analysts’ expectations of $146 billion. The watercooler talkDespite concerns about holiday spending, Amazon reported record…
Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just in terms of product, but as a revenue driver impacting its bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search together and hinted that although search is not yet monetized, “it’s an enormous market and opportunity.” In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries.” “There’s a type of query we’re, I think, particularly good at — I…
The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people’s privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED.The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to “determine or verify” the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show. DHS explicitly linked the rollout to an executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on his…
There are a lot of ways to measure Super Bowl Ads, but perhaps the most interesting way is to gauge the sentiment of the people who actually watched them. That’s why ADWEEK is once again partnering with the USA Today Ad Meter, which is entering its 38th year. We’ll reveal early Monday which commercial from Super Bowl 60 resonated the most with audiences.We’re essentially treating ads like they’re movies. Because at the end of the day, do you choose what you watch based on box office receipts, or their Tomatometer scores?“This is one of the more compelling Super Bowl commercial lineups…
Sometimes, it can seem like the AI industry is racing to see who can spend the most money on data centers. Whoever builds the most data centers will have the most compute, the thinking goes, and thus be able to build the best AI products, which will guarantee victory in the years to come. There are limits to this way of thinking — traditionally, businesses eventually succeed by making more money and spending less — but it’s proven remarkably persuasive for large tech companies. If that is the game, Amazon does seem to be winning. The company announced in its…
Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI “acqui-hires” in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq’s inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers.The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs. The latest reshuffle began three weeks ago, when OpenAI announced it was rehiring…
Scope3, the adtech emissions quantifier-turned agentic media startup helmed by programmatic pioneer Brian O’Kelley is axing more of its staff, just five months after its last round of layoffs.Scope3 declined to confirm the exact number of laid off staffers. But the company confirmed in a statement that it made “further adjustments” to its “commercial and engineering teams to align with market demand.”One impacted employee said they learned they were losing their job on a brief call with their manager last week. They said the news came as a surprise. As of late 2024, the adtech company employed over 100 staffers globally,…
On Monday, OpenAI launched Codex, an agentic coding tool marketed to software developers. Today, OpenAI also launched a new model designed to turbo-charge Codex: GPT-5.3 Codex. The company says that the model transforms Codex from an agent that can merely “write and review code” to one that can do “nearly anything developers and professionals do on a computer, expanding who can build software and how work gets done.” Having tested its new model against a number of performance benchmarks, OpenAI claims that it can create “highly functional complex games and apps from scratch over the course of days.” OpenAI says that…
All told, the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics are estimated to cause the loss of 5.5 square kilometers of snowpack and 34 million metric tons of glacial ice. Without the emissions caused by the event’s three main sponsors, those numbers would be much lower: 2.3 square kilometers of snowpack and about 14 million metric tons of glacial ice.That’s according to a January report from the New Weather Institute, which worked with Scientists for Global Responsibility and Champions for Earth to determine the environmental impacts of the 2026 Winter Olympics and whether or not the staging of the Games was detrimental…
Anthropic’s first Super Bowl ad has become a flashpoint in the AI arms race, drawing a pointed response from OpenAI chief executive (CEO) Sam Altman.In a 420-word post on X, Altman responded to Anthropic’s upcoming Big Game commercial, which touts chatbot Claude’s promise to stay ad-free just weeks after OpenAI said ChatGPT would begin running ads.“First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed,” Altman wrote. “But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never…
The computer systems of La Sapienza in Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe with around 120,000 students, have been down for three days following an apparent ransomware attack. In a post and stories on Instagram published Tuesday, the university said that it took down its systems out of precaution following the cyberattack, that it was investigating the incident and working on restoring all digital services, and that some communication channels such as email and workstations are “partially limited.” The school also said that it was working to restore systems based on backups, which were not affected by the…
Love is in the air, and the WIRED Reviews team has been hard at work finding all sorts of Valentine’s Day deals. From sexy gifts for lovers to date night boxes to sex toys, we’ve got plenty of hand-tested recommendations, and many of them are on sale right now. If you’re still shopping for a gift, you can get yourself or your lover(s) something we recommend at a discount. Just keep in mind that you’ll want to shop sooner than later if you need the items to arrive before February 14.Be sure to check out our related buying guides, including…